Our "Expanding the Debate" special series continues as we open the
discussion to include two third-party vice-presidential candidates who
were excluded last night from the "official" debate between Joe Biden
and Paul Ryan: Cheri Honkala of the Green Party and Luis Rodriguez of
the Justice Party. With the general election just weeks away, Biden and
Ryan squared off in their only debate Thursday night, aggressively
challenging each other on foreign and domestic policy issues asked by
moderator Martha Raddatz of ABC News. Raddatz
pressed them with questions on the deaths of Americans at the U.S.
embassy in Libya, taxes, Medicare, Social Security, the budget deficit,
terrorism and Afghanistan. Raddatz also asked each of the candidates,
both of whom are Catholic, about how their personal beliefs affect their
views on abortion. Romney’s personal wealth came up, but many issues
were missing, including poverty, global warming, immigration, gun
control and the country’s staggering incarceration rates. Democracy Now!
poses many of these same questions today to Honkala and Rodriquez in
order to bring new voices into the discussion. Democracy Now! first
broke the sound barrier during the presidential debate on Oct. 3 by
pausing after answers offered by President Obama and Mitt Romney to get
real-time responses from Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky
Anderson of the Justice Party.
Democracy Gone Astray
Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.
All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.
[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment